Daisies & Murdering the Devil

This event is part of our Surrealism on Film season and will be preceded by a recorded introduction from archive activist feminist collective Invisible Women.

There will be a 10 minute interval between the two features. 

Věra Chytilová’s Daisies is a classic of surrealist cinema and is the most adventurous and anarchic Czech movie of the 1960s. Two young women, both named Marie, revolt against a degenerate, decayed and oppressive society, attacking symbols of wealth and bourgeois culture. A riotous, punk-poem of a film that is both hilarious and mind-warpingly innovative, it has influenced generations of filmmakers. 

Murdering the Devil (also known as The Murder of Mr. Devil and Killing the Devil) was the debut and only feature by Ester Krumbachová, who primarily worked as a costume designer but also wrote the screenplay for Daisies. 

Half comedy, half fairy tale, the film puts a surrealist spin on the battle-of-the-sexes farce as a hot-to-trot Miss Lonelyhearts (Jirina Bohdalová) gets more than she bargained for when she begins wooing the boorish Mr. Devil (Vladimír Mensík), an insatiable glutton who turns out to be (literally) the boyfriend from hell. Featuring a groovy mélange of ’60s lounge muzak, eye-popping art direction, and sumptuous Czech cuisine, Murdering the Devil is a subversive anti-rom-com that coolly cuts male chauvinism down to size and luxuriates in female pleasure, desire, and liberation. 

See both Czech surrealist classics back-to-back on the big screen.